Abstract:
With increasing students qualifying for English Learner (EL) services in Indiana and in the
United States, it is important that educational practitioners and decision-makers know if specific
types of language acquisition programs result in increased achievement, thus increasing equity.
Therefore, the purposes of this study were to explore how third grade EL students in Indiana
performed as compared to their non-EL-peers on the statewide standardized ISTEP+ assessment,
and to examine how kindergarten through third grade EL students attending Dual Immersion
schools performed on national WIDA ACCESS assessments as compared to their EL peers
attending Full Immersion schools.
The methodology for this quantitative study was quasi-experimental design for nonequivalent
control groups in which there were two group comparisons (Creswell, 2009).
Descriptive and inferential statistical analyses were employed and reported. The first set of
analyses compared EL and non-EL students’ ISTEP+ English/language arts and mathematics
scores at the statewide level over three years (2016-2018), and then results were broken down
and analyzed by the demographic subgroups of gender, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, and
school locale. The second comparison evaluated EL students’ WIDA ACCESS reading, writing,
and Overall English Proficiency scores for the same time period (2016-2018). Then, the data
ENGLISH LEARNER STUDENTS, DUAL IMMERSION, AND EQUITY IN INDIANA
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were further disaggregated and analyzed by demographic subgroups for EL students who
attended one of 12 qualifying Dual Immersion schools as compared to scores for EL students
who attended one of 12 comparable Full Immersion schools in Indiana.
For the ISTEP+ assessment comparisons, multiple significant differences in scores were
revealed including EL students from rural schools scoring significantly higher than EL students
from urban schools. Overall, third grade non-EL students scored significantly higher than third
grade EL students across demographic categories. For the WIDA ACCESS assessment,
kindergarten EL students who attended Dual Immersion schools scored significantly higher on
the Overall English Proficiency assessment than kindergarten EL students who attended Full
Immersion schools. Likewise, first grade EL students from Dual Immersion schools scored
significantly higher than first grade EL students from Full Immersion schools in the reading,
writing, and Overall English Proficiency assessment. In addition, kindergarten through third
grade EL girls who attended Dual Immersion schools scored significantly higher on the WIDA
ACCESS assessment than did their EL girl-peers who attended Full Immersion schools.
Conclusions from this study’s results indicated significant differences between EL and non-
EL students’ content-based performance on the third grade ISTEP+ assessment and revealed
significant discrepancies when assessment results were differentiated by demographic subgroups.
For the 2016 to 2018 WIDA ACCESS assessment, there were statistically significant differences
in EL students’ performance based on gender and grade.
Several recommendations for educational practice emerged from this study’s results
including increased Dual Immersion options for primary grade EL students and expanded
evidence-based academic remediation targeted to improve EL students’ academic achievement.
